340B Used to Be Too Dull for Polite Company. This Week’s News Coverage Suggests That’s Changing

Programming Note: Unless something fun happens, Cost Curve is off tomorrow. 

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It looks like yesterday was a quiet day, thank goodness. I’ll be traveling back from Adam Fein’s Drug Channels Leadership Forum today, which was mind-expanding. So I’m hoping for another quiet day. 

Thanks to Adam for a great time. And extra-special thanks to the Wall Street luminaries on my panel yesterday: Elizabeth Anderson, Michael Cherney, and George Hill.

THE ARC/ Taking Note of the Fact that Media Are Taking Note of 340B

One of the hard parts about spending so much time marinating in health policy is that I lose a bit of perspective about what the average American actually finds important. I mean, you all are willing to slog through GPO or copay maximizer commentary day after day, but you all are not a particularly representative sample.

So I use media coverage as a kind of proxy for which topics may be breaking through. 

Yesterday, I posted on a federal filing from Monday (and an Endpoints piece) about the government’s response in the 340B “rebate model” lawsuit. It was a classic 340B story: largely a process update, no new arguments, no commentary from the participants, possibly some opportunities for the true wonks to try to read between the lines. 

And yet when I ran my scans this morning, I saw that Axios and Fierce had also picked up the story. Now, that’s not exactly a groundswell of media coverage, but it suggests that there’s an increasing sense that 340B is something where such coverage is no longer optional. 

The same argument can be made for the WSJ piece on “340B middlemen” over the weekend. It was not an easy story to report or write. And yet a general-interest national newspaper felt like this topic was so important that they worked to bust through those barriers to publish something. 

A year ago, coverage of 340B legal filings would have been a proverbial tree falling in the forest: No one would have heard it. Ditto for complex stories about Rube Goldberg-level mechanics to deliver 340B discounts to employers. 

I would have read those articles. You would have read them. Everyone else would have skipped right to working on their March Madness brackets. 

But today, there’s a sense that these stories are so important that -- dull or not -- they need to be told. 

It’s a new world. 

QUICK TURNS/ IRA Lawsuits and Carping About the AARP/United Relationship

• On the subject of topics-so-important-that-even-marginal-stories-are-getting-covered, this Fox piece about a new PBM bill is kind of weird. I don’t think this is a serious new piece of legislation (let me know if I’m wrong!), but PBM reform is now a big enough deal that even so-so news is getting covered. Noteworthy!

• There is absolutley nothing new in this Fox Business article that gleefully attacks AARP for getting into bed with United. But I’m sure it will amuse some of you, so I wanted to pass it along.

• I’ve always thought that the most interesting, and perhaps most promising, legal attack against the IRA is not the constitutional objection but CMS’ fast-and-loose approach to implementing price controls. That argument is at the heart of Teva’s lawsuit against the government, and four additional companies just filed an amicus brief supporting and amplifying Teva’s POV. 

• OptumRx is scaling back prior auths for 80 meds, including asthma and cystic fibrosis drugs that the company feels are “no longer clinically necessary to review.” Credit where credit is due: This is good news for patients. And, hopefully, just the start. 

Cost Curve is produced by Reid Strategic, a consultancy that helps companies and organizations in life sciences communicate more clearly and more loudly about issues of value, access, and pricing. We offer a range of services, from strategic planning to tactical execution, designed to shatter the complexity that hampers constructive conversations. 

To learn more about how Reid Strategic can help you, email Brian Reid at [email protected].